If you’re a podcast listener you’ll probably be familiar with the two podcasts whose names I’ve mashed up for the purposes of this series of posts. I thought it apt because what I’d like to do is to give you an idea of my creative process (à la Song Exploder) as I actually work through it over the next few weeks and months (à la Serial) on a new song called “Wrestle With Giants”.

When trying to lay down bass tracks it’s not always that easy. Mainly because I don’t have a bass guitar. That hasn’t stopped me in the past but this time around I have a new secret alternative weapon: my sweet new used electric piano. It has a pretty decent sounding synthesized fingered acoustic bass. But despite this there’s one major flaw when trying to record a bass part using a keyboard: you can’t do slides. I think the musical term is glissando…or if you’re really cool: “gliss”. It’s a subtle but very effective technique by those who play stringed instruments to stick it to all other instruments who don’t have this ability (except tromboners and…slide whistle-eers). Seriously though, it’s one of those things that distinguishes a part from a performance.

So as you listen to this latest iteration of Wrestle With Giants…listen for the bass part. I’ll leave the bass performance for those who say “gliss”.

Ok, so let’s all move on from the fact that it’s been over a year since I’ve written. I know, I know…baaaad blogger.

Now then. There’s one thing that my musical exploits have reflected in my civilian life: Food. I suppose food and music have collided in the past…but, well…I’m gonna blog about it.

So the more I got good at “preparing dishes” (as opposed to “making food”), I would find myself busily going about a recipe when I would think to myself “y’know…this could maybe be bammed up with a bit of [random ingredient]”. Sometimes it would work (coffee and rosemary in beef stew) and sometimes it wouldn’t (beef stew and rosemary in coffee). But it’s making a connection between two tastes you savoured independently and then marrying them successfully that’s quite a thrilling and fulfilling accomplishment.

I find that it’s the same for music. When producing or arranging a song, I try to find instruments and sounds that will compliment it but that are also not your most expected elements. Some great examples (well, great to me) are the dark tom tom drums in my song “(Never) Let It Go” or the trumpet part in “It Was Love“.

With no false modesty, I think I’m pretty good at finding these matches. But sometimes, like Bovine Brew coffee, it just doesn’t work out. My latest song release, “Until“, is a perfect example of both a musical match and a music mismatch. Initially I sang the track like you can hear on the demo:

Darn right I’m right! But despite the Lyndsie coup, the song was still languishing under another misguided musical attempt: the introduction of a harmonica during an instrument break. Despite the old college try from my producer, it still sounds like a braking freight train. Listen again to the above track and skip to 3:19.

Now as you wait for your hair to quit standing on end, enjoy the much better final version where we swapped out the harp for some subtle musical shadings instead of something that sounds like a wounded raccoon.

Remember when Michael Jackson died? I sure do…it’s face-palmingly #2 in my event memory right after 9/11. You may also remember how at his memorial service Mariah Carey was criticized for a sub-par performance due to being overcome with emotion. That criticism confused me. I thought: “She’s singing a heartfelt ballad at the memorial of one of her musical heroes while his body from a tragic death lies steps away in a casket. If I were up there I’d give myself 3 seconds before losing my shit.” And that’s why I’m not doing shows before tens of thousands of fans at the Staples Center. As a professional musician, your job is to not lose your shit in such circumstances. Shit losing is not an option.

Even at the local level, I was talking to a fellow musician after his gig and he was telling me of the interpretation he was putting into the music and how we was trying to express each note in a specific fashion. I stood there dumbfounded because when I get off the stage my thoughts are typically “well, four f***-ups tonight…hey not bad!” Pros, on the other hand, rarely make mistakes. Flawless technical execution is a given for a professional. Instead, they focus on interpretation. They convey feeling. They engage. They connect.

Spot the Amateur – observe the behaviour, do a shot!

Another way I’ve found to understand what makes a musician professional is to identify their antithesis: the amateur. So…:

If they’re playing guitar, watch if they look down at their fretboard with that “ok I can do this” look when bar chords come up. Amateur!

If they’re sound-checking, listen for key terms like “backline“, “hot“, “XLR” rather than “this crap I need up on stage”, “ow! my ears”, “mic plug thing with the three holes”. Amateur!

Essentially, if you see a performer on stage who just…belongs there, you’re seeing a pro. Otherwise, prepare yourself to get really drunk.

As for moi…

Am I pro material? After some soul searching my answer is…”no”. Sure, I’ve cut my stupid stage “jokes” way down and have learned a few gear-related keywords that make me seem less like a hopelessly bumbling boob to sound guys. But when it comes to the most visible part of the job, the performance, it’s just not my forté and I’m sure audiences can sense that.

The good news about being an amateur is that it’s a step to becoming a professional and I know many are on that path and will make the transition. But for me and my wrong-chord-prone left hand, I’ll just sit and wait for that call from the Staples Center. And it’ll likely go: “…don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Then I’ll lose my shit.

I’ve been reflecting on what the “professional” in “professional musician” means. I guess technically it means you get paid to do music. And that you can now write off that $10,000 vintage Fender as a “business expense”. I’ve seen a number of people quit their jobs to do music full time probably thinking “I’m going to be a professional musician and get paid to do music, just like Blue Blog said.” I truly admire their moxy, their drive, their choice of blog reading and maybe I even admire their music. I certainly wish them all the success in the world.

But then, the real definition of “professional” comes crashing down like my fist through a hipster’s fake glasses. And guess how much that definition has to do with music? Very. Little. What does it have to do with? Marketing. Business planning. Financial planning. Accounting. Project management. Merchandising. Licensing. Forecasting. Networking…freakin’ Web Programming even!

An Analogy

Once in awhile I’ll cook a juicy-ass steak on the barbie like a champ. But my next thought isn’t: “Damn! I should open my own steakhouse!” And that’s what I find striking out as a pro musician to be like. Don’t get me wrong, the world would be a better place if every Backyard Billy Bob could open a steakhouses on their street corner. It would kick even more ass if next to these steakhouses there were cozy little music venues where I could walk in, secure a residency, pack the place every night and get a guarantee that would allow me to regularly go next door for steak.

Ah, if only the life of a professional musician could be made of steaks. Instead, it’s more made of microwave burritos. So the dream of taking the world by storm gets a reality check when you realize you’re doing your CD release in Ottawa on a weekday night in a small bar to a half-filled room…half of which are your musicians.

Oh, that last scenario? True story of a show I attended.…and he was a Juno winner.

There are many good reasons why I am not an actor. Most revolve around the fact that I can’t act.

There are also several good reasons why I shouldn’t sing but screw those. The beauty about being a singer-songwriter is that you can do what you love with relatively little effort. To wit, I can hop on over to any open stage, sign up and get to sing an original composition in front of an audience and get applaused at. And that’s pretty much the name of the game for us singer-songwriters.

Actors have it a lot tougher. Or I assume that they do since I know few actors. The pinnacle of an actor’s career would probably be to have a juicy lead role in an Anderson(Paul or Wes) movie or Herzog or Von Trier or Scorcese or whatever other director I can’t think of right now that would lead you to believe that I watch movies beyond those whose title contain the words “Human” and “Centipede“.

But how often does that happen for an actor? How often do they have to take roles like “Middle Human Centipede Link” before a choice role may or may not come up? Even if they take the bull by the horns and write a screenplay and sweet role for themselves, you still have to produce the movie(and produce it well) and have it distributed to get some kind of return on effort.

The only difference between an open stage and “making it” for a singer-songwriter is audience size, really. If Justin Beiber tweeted me tomorrow and I blew up huge, I’d still be singing and forgetting the words to “Blues’ll Always Be the Blues“, just to a lot more screaming tweens who have no idea what an old man I am.

So I guess this is a blog post to remind myself and other struggling singer-songwriters to be happy that you can share your undiluted work with an audience. Saying you played a small bar to five drunk people in the middle of What-The-Hell-Am-I-Doing-Here, northern Ontario still has a ring of keeping-it-real coolness to it than an actor listing as a credit: “Shirtless Oil Guy” in Kung Fu and Titties.

Yes, Nickelback. This song legitimizes the band for me because it features a lost guitar solo by the late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrel and was fully endorsed by his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul. The song does a great job striking a delicate balance between a revenge fantasy and a song about loss. The imagery of sitting and scratching someone’s name on the side of a bullet, I feel, is quite powerful and leaves a lot to the listener’s imagination.

Not only did composer Harold Arlen find rhymes for the word “Oz”, but he does it repeatedly with different words and clever puns through the chorus while capturing the essence and whimsy of the scene quite brilliantly.

You know you’ve had a nice, long, distinguished career when you can write a four-minute song that’s composed almost entirely of the song titles of your back catalogue. A fun, gimmicky and surprisingly catchy song by veteran shredders and 1/2 born-again Christians Megadeth.

The best way for me to feel inadequate about my songwriting is to listen to and analyze an Eminem song. Structurally and thematically, they are nothing short of astounding. Lose Yourself features so many advanced rhyming techniques that it makes my head spin. Not to mention that this song is epically inspiring, faithfully captures independent musician life, and just pumps me the hell up.

I’ve been starting to brand my style of music as “melancholy folk-pop”. This is the 18th century version of it. Except a lot better. This is the kind of piece you hold your breath listening to. Dark, beautiful.

A melody you can whistle along to is a sure indicator of a good song. And this melody just struck me as I listened to it on college radio driving home in the wee hours one night in Toronto. I subsequently stole it for a song of my own.

First of all the swelling string intro is gorgeous. And it continues into another fantastically lovely melody. I just have a tiny beef with the lyric “I don’t know when/I don’t know how/but I know something’s starting right now”. Doesn’t “starting right now” answer the “when” question?

One thing I lament about being a singer/songwriter is that I’ll never really be able to really rock an audience. I mean really just wield my guitar like it was an adrenaline-spewing über weapon. That’s ok though…the boys from Metallica do a mighty fine job with this song that’s good on the album but killer live.

A study in simplicity. A 2 minute song whose melody is essentially the alphabet song. When doing a ridiculously optimistic song, you always run the risk of going into cheeseball territory. This song didn’t, probably because it was kept simple and due to the sincerity and believability of ‘ol Satchmo’s singing.

The main theme is so deceptively simple…just a pattern of four notes repeated in variation four times. But it’s so rich and just absolutely full of emotion. I haven’t even seen Gone With the Wind but just from this theme you can get a sense of the epic scope of the film.

Yes, simplicity is good, but sometimes a showpiece will bring the house down. As well as my estimation of myself. If you’re impatient, you can fast-forward to 5:36 where you can watch a nerdy-looking polio surviving violiner do some serious badass pwn-age.

Let me tell you a story. A story of torturous decisions, of trying circumstances, of struggling against the odds….a story of…..heavy metal.

About a year ago I had a couple of days of vacation booked to go down to Sacramento to see Metallica live. Yes, Metallica. Literally hours before my flight, some s*** hit the fan at work. And when you’re on a Marketing team with limited resources, when s*** hits the fan, the scatological blast radius is all-encompassing. As evening wore into night(and as my early flight time loomed), the possibility that I’d have to cancel the trip and miss the concert became probability. It’s a good thing that the office was empty around midnight because I would have been bad company given the dark mood I was in.

After much agonizing though, I decided to go, dealing with the consequences as they came. And come they did as the situation worsened as I learned over costly long distance calls and text messages. By the time I got to Sacramento, I was out of my dark mood…and in a much dimmer, deeper, danker and dangerous one.

And then….the concert.

There is a holy moment when music connects with you. Really. Just. Connects. And like the alignment of the cosmos in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metallica, for one night only, was my Monolith. Being 28-year veteran Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, the band’s mastery of their technique and live show was something to behold. All the stress and tension from work didn’t just melt away but was lit on fire and cooked extra crispy in a hail of stage pyrotechnics and 115dB guitar shred. Never have I screamed along word-for-word and pumped my fist in the air with such reckless, furious abandonment than at this show.

I’ve been to a lot of concerts and many have been memorable spectacles in my life, but this concert, well this time…it was personal. And the frustration I was feeling from the “real world” took a back seat for a couple of hours as a monumental exercise in the power of music played out within me.

So the stigma of metal be damned. Or any type of music for that matter. I hope you’ve had or will one day have an experience similar to mine whether it be from a Metallica show, or a Justin Beiber show. Although it’d probably take another Metallica conert to allow me to vent the complications of attending a Beiber show…

I was watching a film by Hideo Miyazaki, the Japanese animation master whose genius movies always fill me with awe and a deep, deep, sense of burning jealousy. Petty envy aside, his process is one of months, if not years. Meetings, storyboards, screen tests, and of course, pages of pages of painstaking frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation and still, in the end, a soul-stirring finished product. This kind of discipline astounds me…but it it inspires me too. And so, the question du jour:

If my best songwriting comes from short bursts of inspiration, how can I apply the epic scope of moviemaking to it?

This is not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. And I have the answer. And the answer comes in two words: Rock Opera. Or perhaps a different two words: Concept Album. Or if you like efficiency, one word: Musical.

All similar terms to describe the answer and the next Blue Blue Satellite challenge(for me, not you). Although “concept album” would be a bit of a misnomer seeing as I don’t even have a regular album to my name. And come to think of it, even “rock opera” doesn’t fit because I sing folk.

Oh well, call it what you will, I’m going to take up the challenge to express with thematically related songs a story with definite plot points, character arcs and, considering my inexperience as well as my laziness, deus ex machina after deus ex machina!

So, I won’t give myself a timeline. It’ll give me something to work on indefinitely rather than bore you guys with yet another song about unrequited love…unless of course, it was all just a dream.

Looking back at the Blue Blog, I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this topic before. If ever I had a pre-rehearsed, ranting opinion about something, it is the following:

Accusing an artist of selling out is itself a sellout.

I’m applying this specifically to musical criticisms, like when an artist switches styles, not when an artist hawks an ad or sells their song to a Burger King or a Grand Theft Auto.

First off, the sellout argument has been so over-used that it carries zero weight and tells your listener or reader nothing about your opinion. It’s like being anti-gay marriage and wading into the debate armed only with the already-specious “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” line. It’s lazy reasoning.

Secondly, if a songwriter who’s known for, say, deep, introspective lyrics decides to do a bubblegum pop album, as long as he or she still writes all their own songs, that’s not selling out. If you and only you are creating something artistic, no matter how “commercial” or “mainstream” it is, it’s still coming from your own creative force and that makes it unique and legit…i.e. not a sellout.

I’m saying all this because I’ve found that I’m running out of ideas for songs. Specifically, the lyrical theme of a song…i.e. the subject matter. I’d love to tell you that I’ve had a hard life and that I’ve hitchhiked coast to coast and met every type of man, woman and child along the way and therefore have a wealth of songs buried in me, but the truth is, I’m an average, middle class Canadian. So what does that mean for Blue Blue Satellite lyrics? It means….I lie. If I can’t come up with lyrics from the heart, I will make them up. That’s right. So if I write a song that sounds uber sincere, think twice…I just may want you to think it’s sincere. But, following from my “sellout” theory above, it’s the very fact that I want you to think it’s sincere that makes it sincere. It’s pretty much the songwriting equivalent of movie making. I’m sure Coppola would have loved to capture and chronicle the life and drama of a real mafia family in real-time, but since he couldn’t, he created a fictional account of one. But it doesn’t make it any less of a powerful film.

So here’s the twist. My latest song, “The Storyteller” is a song about all of this. I think the line “but even if there’s one attentive ear / you’ll see it drive away the doubt and fear” sums it all up. In the end, who really cares if a songwriter wrote a song, if it’s in line with their previous work, if they actually experienced what’s being sung, if you’re interpreting it as they intended? If you’re touched by a song, that’s what’s real and that’s all that matters.

I started my web presence on MySpace back in 2005. MySpace has always been good to me. Thank you MySpace. You gave me a means by which I can have my modest artist page and have my tunes streaming front and centre, showing off to the world how few people listen to my songs.

But the time has come to turn the (web)page. The only active thing left on the MySpace account was my blog which, bafflingly, got almost 3x the traffic that my songs had. The blog has been fun and will continue, but will continue here at WordPress. I’m sorry MySpace, your relevance is waning. Even your testament of how few people listen to me has been usurped …that job now goes to my YouTube channel.

BLUE BLUE SATELLITE MYSPACE BLOG READERS: Thank you for reading. I can’t believe you do, but the numbers don’t lie…so thank you. But the fun isn’t about to let up…welcome to the WordPress blog…please continue reading right here, right now.